TRADITIONAL, NOT CONVENTIONAL.

Why Does It Take More Than One Adjustment? (July 8, 2014)

Chiropractors get this question all the time. There's something about a spinal adjustment that makes a lot of people (especially newbies) think that after an effective one, the pain should stay away forever. Maybe the instant relief feels like something is finally "fixed". Or maybe it's the way some chiropractors talk about manipulation and a patient's spine being “in” or “out” as though vertebrae were pop beads that just click into or out of place. Possibly after a long period of pain relief after a course of treatment, you wake up one morning with some version of the pain again and you feel kind of cheated. You even hear people speculate that chiropractors have something special we do to your back during a manipulation so that you HAVE to keep coming back. (We wish we had that much control over people's symptoms!)

Spinal manipulation sounds and feels like it's working through a change in structure, but actually it works through re-training the nervous system. When you “pop” a spinal joint, you’ve taken it slightly past its normal range of motion (and incidentally that is why you do NOT let people who aren’t experts adjust you). When that happens the muscles in that area instantly relax, relieving muscle spasm and increasing circulation. The range of motion of the area, which was restricted before the adjustment, returns to an increased, more normal range and your whole body is now able to move more like it’s meant to. This all results in less pain and inflammation.

So why is this necessary more than once? Because it's a form of learning for your nervous system. Some people only DO need to be adjusted once (rare, but it happens) – usually younger people who haven’t had their pain for long and who are in otherwise great shape. An adjustment is a step toward restoring the spine to normal function, but the longer you've had pain and disability and/or the worse the injury was, the more re-learning your spine has to do to get back to normal.

This is a very simplified explanation, and there are a lot of other factors involved in getting out of pain and back to full function of course, but essentially your body has to re-learn normal. The longer it’s been in an abnormal state, the longer it will take to get back where it should be. Exercise helps a lot. So does good nutrition and general health. ALL those things attempt to restore normal function to your body. That's the basic idea behind chiropractic adjustment, acupuncture, good nutrition and alternative therapies in general -- not to cure disease as much as to eliminate it.